Two Opposing Views of Homelessness

The Pale of Settlement. Stories by Margot Singer. University of Georgia. 213 pages. 2008. $24.95.
A Map of Home. By Randa Jarrar. 292 pages. Other Press, 2008. $24.95
 
Reviewed by James Dalglish
 
Two works of fiction, one Jewish in origin by Margo Singer, the other Palestinian by Randa Jarrar, clash violently in tone – just as their nations do in reality – yet bear a common theme: the drift of homelessness.
 
The collection of stories The Pale of Settlement by Margo Singer is tied together by the character of one young woman Susan, an American Jew with relatives in Israel whose peregrinations back and forth between Israel and the US connect most of the stories and themes. She seems to be a sexually sought woman of uncertain commitment whether in her love affairs, place of residence or profession.
 
The collection is full of insights on its principal theme--the process of self-dissociation through displacement. Singer’s characters are Jewish Americans and Israelis for the most part, so Jewish problems and migration patterns of course concern her the most. She is an expert at describing the various shades of change and loss that afflict them but which apply to the typical expatriate as well.
 
The author also tries to situate her characters within a historical context so that their decisions and desires are seen in relation to real events. In “Hazor” she tries to connect the theme of the difficulty of digging out other people’s secrets to the archeology of Israel whose layers of rock reveal differing interpretations depending on you’re Arab or Jew. This is perhaps the most profound story.
 
Another impressive tale, “Expatriate,” features a Jewish family who originate in Israel but move to New York City (violating the stereotype) and lose their Israeliness while not becoming fully Jewish-American either. The family’s first-born, conceived in Israel, may have had an Arab father, but we never find out for sure. The most interesting thing about them though is not this suggested scandal but all the shades of time-and-space alienation the author discerns in their situation.
 
Singer writes well and often with lapidary polish but sometimes her metaphors go awry:
She [an infant] gazed at Leah as if there was a certain knowledge sealed inside her, like a crystal hidden in a geode sharp and bright... She lost that look with time of course, .... As self-consciousness came trawling like a fisherman’s long net across her mind.
 
With the first image you cheer, with the second (“fisherman’s long net”?) you wish she’d had a tougher editor.
 
In The Pale of Settlement, the Jewish characters are always off to someplace, most often to Israel, but also to Berlin or simply touring--in Nepal for example. Unlike in Saul Bellow’s or Philip Roth’s fiction there are few important non-Jewish characters in these stories; Jews and Israelis circulate, immigrate and become tourists largely among themselves.
 
The greatest crisis of conscience toward the Palestinian issue is experienced by Susan, working as a journalist in the story “Body Count” which refers to a real incident in the West Bank during the Second Intifada when the Israeli Army was accused of a massacre in the city of Jenin. Susan’s greatest worry is that she may have been suckered by the Palestinians into exaggerating the body count in the Jenin incident (the actual one was bad enough).
 
It might seem cruel and perverse to include in the same review a novel by an Israeli and a Palestinian, representatives of two warring tribes since time immemorial, but strangely enough the two works bear many resemblances. A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar is similarly obsessed with roots and the lack of them as its very ironic title suggests. You almost wish the two authors would sit down together to share notes, so identical are the themes that preoccupy both.
 
But in all probability they wouldn’t find much in common.
 
Whereas Singer writes a cool disciplined prose inherited from Flaubert, Randa Jarrar’s aggressive temperament expresses itself in hyperbole, slang and a good deal of unabashed obscenity. (This was shocking to me until I passed the book to a compatriot of the lead character I knew who said she liked precisely that about it.)
 
Yet Jarrar’s Palestinian family ranks as high on the scale of displaced sensibility as does Susan’s. The architect father Waheed is automatically an exile by virtue of being a Palestinian; her mother is half-Egyptian, half-Greek so Nabila, their daughter and heroine of the story, is sufficiently mixed in her origins to boast about it. They have lost their secure middle class status (like many Palestinians) but appealingly still have pretentions to artistic and intellectual accomplishment.
 
Narrated by the sharp tongued heroine Nabila, her family (previously expelled from Palestine) is forced out of Kuwait by Saddam’s invasion in 1990, escape to Egypt through Iraq (the most exciting episode), survive for a while in Alexandria, and finally move to America, landing in rural Texas no less, where the narrator succeeds in losing her virginity and getting into a ‘good school on the East coast.’
 
They are hardened travelers but not tourists. “On the plane to Egypt,” Jarrar writes, “I watched the tourists that surrounded us and thought how nice it would be to travel just for the sake of traveling, how nice it would be to leave one country for another willingly... for fun!”
 
You can hear the tone of the eternal aggrieved adolescent in almost every sarcastic line of Nabila’s account of her family’s woes. When she isn’t writing her eccentric, competitive essays, her typical interests are unsurprisingly sex, boys and pop music. We believe in her brilliance—though there are perhaps too many demonstrations of her wit.
 
The most touching theme in A Map of Home is the family’s search for precisely that--a home. Father Waheed often draws maps of the lost Palestine the ‘map’ of the title, so his daughter will remember a place where she never lived. A short episode takes the family back to Palestine for the funeral of a grandfather where Nabila sees how the original loss took place. Baba explains: “I lost my home ...and gained an education... which later became my home. That can also happen for you.”
 
The close and sometimes violent father-daughter relationship is at the heart of the book. In anarchic America, however the father’s tyranny collapses, which he takes well, in a series of comic pratfalls. With the support of her mother, Nabila emerges from the Oedipal conflict without too many scars.
 
Both works offer a paradoxical mix of internationalized but still essentially tribal fiction. The title that has the better chance of escaping its tribal origins and addressing a wider audience is no doubt the boisterous, uninhibited A Map of Home.
 
Review originally published in Bloomsbury Review March-April 2009: page 17.
 
(In fact, Jarrar’s novel won some prizes, and the author gained a fair amount of fame – and was seen recently at the Dubai Lit Festival. I hope her second act is as good or better.)

Confessions of a Paper Addict

Confessions of a Paper Addict

After listening to many wise comments in support of an initiative to replace paper textbooks with electronic equivalents in hundreds of courses at a local university during a high level departmental meeting, I didn’t think the discussion’d exhausted the topic so sat down and wrote some reflections on a topic I feel strongly about: the future of readable print.

First, I agree that paper is one of the heaviest substances on earth – and yes, carrying around a whole set of behemoth hardbacks or just one specimen, say, of the mighty Norton Anthologies series of British or American literature can be a nearly back-breaking task.

Before we rush into that paperless utopia, however, please consider these points. First, have you ever tried reading an ebook? Did you enjoy the experience? During break I found myself forced to read ebooks due to lack of proper illumination in my ecotouristically remote hotel room (and a boring print choice, Desert by JMG Le Clezio in French). I read grudgingly on my laptop till late at night (I can’t sleep unless I read a bit beforehand) a collection of Chekhov short stories downloaded from Gutenburg. It wasn’t a great deal of fun for some reason (maybe because Chekhov is a poor fit for the tropics & I’d already read most of the stories), so I tried to buy and download a bestseller as well, one of those “Girl who Kicked the Hornet Nest” series that I imagined would be more fun to read in a Nippon hut. Even after shelling out, however, it failed to jive with several e-readers I’d acquired. The Adobe reader showed only one page at a time – horrors!

I wondered if my negative experience was due to using a poor e-reader program, and so the next step was to download a better reading program. Which I did pronto and indeed found that “BookReader” was an improvement, showing two pages for example, and emitting a papery “whoosh!” when page clicking--but of course not allowing mimetic finger swipes (as on ipad). I haven’t used an Ipad for any extended time, so can’t pronounce on that device. I suspect that I would prefer it to other ereading gadgets but would probably ultimately give it up for the reasons I mentioned.

I’m still trying to get thru an ecopy edition of Huxley’s Brave New World and don’t know if it’s the turgid late chapters of that novel or the annoyance of having to constantly “click” the page that turned me off. At this moment I can’t say I have ever finished reading an ebook.

Even if you don’t mind the clumsy electronic apparatus, however, this kind of reading is superficial because you can’t jot marginalia – nor compile notes inside the back-cover. I know, I know, I’ve seen the clever ipad marginalia system, and it might work for the younger generation, but for me this is actually inefficient compared to what I can do more quickly with primitive tools such as a pencil and paper. Besides, I like the tactile impressions those two objects make on each other.

If I were using a book for research or reviewing it professionally, I would never use an ebook; it would be impossible to read the text thoroughly enough by flipping through screens; the fact is a paper book (I mean a book made of paper) gives more random access than the fastest computer. Besides, the small screens block scanning and skimming tactics that readers sometimes need to “cheat” or review at whim. I think it’s possible those small screens block a lot of the peripheral text I like to play with while reading in depth. E-readers, no matter how well intentioned, make reading more linear.

The esthetic aspects of reading are also important to my mind. To take a book seriously, I need a physical object in my hands – the heft of pages of a certain brightness and the resistance of the binding. Paper and actual print –such as Goudy Old Style or Garamond and not hideously ugly efonts. The publisher’s imprint tells me a lot too about the physical quality of the book. I also like to note my progress thru the book as the divide between read and unread pages gradually moves from left to right and the ratio of read to unread diminishes to zero. In the case of a difficult book, what an accomplishment; in the case of a fascinating page turner, a happy melancholy.

My more serious arguments against e-book media are these. First of all ownership of content. I don’t know if you read the recent news about Amazon customers who had content—ebooks—removed from their devices that they had purchased from Amazon. This struck me as a poor way to treat double customers having bought both “Nook” and an ebook file. But the incident is highly significant about the medium in question. You may “buy” a “book” from Amazon but the content is still under the company’s control. For someone who grew up with an extensive personal library, this is a chilling prospect. Apple’s itunes has one of the same limitations—Apple can and does control all the content you download from the itunes store. I can’t even make another copy of music I buy to play on another device. At least with books, you have a clear right of ownership – and the company can’t reclaim it.

(I'd like to see a representative from Random House have my house surrounded, knock on my door at midnight and "repo" my copy of "Ulysses.")

The other objection I have against e-books is based on the well-known tendency of computer companies and media merchants who adopt electronic media to enforce upgrade cycles on their customers. For ebook buyers, the idea of one’s library going out of date due to some hardware or software upgrade, unless they pay up, is certainly a possibility, no better an inevitability given the nature of the electronics business. Whereas for old-fashioned paper addicts like myself hooked on Gutenburg’s, system, no system 2.0 can come along to make it unreadable.

There is a place for ebooks in my opinion – reference works that you can’t carry around & only use for a few minutes, but I’ve seen few on the market I would use.

My last argument is semi mystical: to me a book is a living thing (almost). One develops a deep relationship with a book through its physical manifestation – yes – but the spirit deep inside it can’t be released unless its pages are turned by living fingers and oxygenated in the actual air. Only paper and ink can preserve the living spirit deep inside books. Finally, electronic media will never allow the mystic-physical interpenetration between book and reader that is essential to the life of the mind.

My final conviction: the life of the mind depends upon books, not ebooks, real books printed on paper in recognizable typography that you can carry around with you, show to others, discuss & build up a culture. If you get rid of real books and those quaint institutions we used to call bookstores but the French rightly call libraries then farewell life of the mind. A recent news story indicating the mental benefits to those who read long and complex works of fiction should give pause for thought.

A paper addict and Gutenburg throwback to the bitter end!
James Dalglish (poor sap!) has reviewed hundreds of books in Japan, Hong Kong, London, the USA and Middle East (including for the Review).

Fall of a another tyrant -- Bravo!

Good work! Good work the Libyan people! Good work the “rag tag” army of the NTC with their amusing inefficiency and lightly armored pick up trucks. Good work the NTC that starting out as a tiny unconvincing group in Benghazi eventually against all odds got its act together and achieved its goal of defeating the man known as “Colonel” (what is it about that rank that seems to appeal to some people) and getting international recognition. Good work NATO and (for a change!) good work Obama. But what kept him for so long from recognizing the vast political and economic opportunity? Good work Bernard Levy, who did, & first talked Sarkozi into intervening. The French, British and Obama get credit for stumbling into the principle of humanitarian intervention which seems to me a new and promising concept. This liberal form of international activism is more positive and constructive than Bush’s conservative version practiced in Iraq. Good work Qatar whose al Jazeera publicized the lengthy uprising. As for the Arab league, they deserve credit I’m sure but a local news blackout on the related facts kept this contribution secret. And finally good work, “Colonel” who did a good job of dying the way he said he would.

I imagine these events weren’t lost on a certain pointy headed narrow eyed dictator to the north whose nights will be more sleepless.

A few quibbles, however, with the news channels who brought us the events. CNN and Wolf Blitzer seemed incensed that Gaddafi may have been executed and at one point was threatening to study every frame of the videotape for evidence of that in one part of the tape G was alive and in a later one dead. --a theme picked up by Hala Gorani whose eyes glowed with moralistic fervor. They seemed ready to start playing Great World Media Pontificator and condemn the Libyans for abandoning the script they were supposed to follow and rule of law – the Libyan ambassador however (a certain Jajani?) when grilled by Blitzer asserted his view that the way Gadaffi died wasn’t important – only the fact that he was dead so that the nation could begin rebuilding without distractions. He admitted that it might have been useful to have Gadaffi around for questioning so as to get to the bottom of all his corrupt dealings and hidden loot – but on the whole felt that the “Colonel’s” survival and trial would have presented more conflicts and problems than benefits.

The celebrants interviewed on Tripoli’s main square that night by Al Jazeera similarly seemed unfazed by the seemingly disorderly and casual nature of the demise of Gadaffi – it was a bit much to expect the citizens of a country in the throes of celebrating a revolution – in a country moreover that hadn’t seen any rule of law in 42 years to appreciate the legalistic questions of TV reporters. James Bays seemed particularly preachy when he kept asking the crowd, if it “wasn’t time to put the guns away.” He interviewed one young militia man, carrying a rifle, who replied patiently and reasonably, then asked a young woman the same question, pointing to the young man with the rifle. It was all done with an annoying air of superiority. He and & Al Jezeera would have done better and come off as less self-righteous if he’d simply reported the jubilation rather than lecture the Libyans having their first party in 42 years. It seems clear that the Libyans dealt with the situation in a way consistent with their beliefs, practices and expectations. Good luck to the Libyans'democratic revolution -- too bad that our country seems bent on choosing plutocracy instead.

Written at Massa Hotel #5, AlAin, where I am batching it due to necessary departure of family for the Philippines. I’m working a handy load this term; and am recovering from a back injury sustained when moving out of the family apartment last July. This set up is the usual one required in Visiting contracts, so the hotel is full of other university staff and professors in the same situation. I have to rest most of the time, am in physio-therapy and hope to be better by Christmas when I plan to visit the family.

Edward Said's Orientalism & 9/11

Note: I originally planned last year to publish a list of books useful for comprehending the events of 9/11 but of course that never came about. The problem was and still is lack of time to do much independent reading of any kind... So what follows are the few fragments I did manage to put on paper... while resting from a back injury in Istanbul and Bodrem, Turkey. Your frank opinion on these opinionated lucubrations wood as always be greatly appreciated along with suggestions for publication. Why do I keep harassing you with this guff? Unfortunately, it’s lack of any outlets or kindred spirits in the vicinity. --JD

1. Orientalism by Edward Said. This book though first published in 1978 would seem on the surface to have no direct bearing on 9/11; since it purportedly deals with the history of Western conceptualization and exploitation of Said’s native region, however, focusing for the most part on how Arab cultures and Islam have been misunderstood and misinterpreted by the West, perhaps this book is more relevant than it would seem. I undertook the task to reread the book this year and try to overcome my old hostility toward it – I hate to have sitting on the shelf a book that has defeated my patience but still requires a response. The first installment of my “rereading” is published here – a comment on Said’s preface to the latest edition of the book in 2003. I will publish detailed comments on the rest of the book

The suicide bombing phenomenon has appeared with all its hideous damage, none more lurid and apocalyptic of course than the events of September 11 and their aftermath in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.

Edward Said’s preface to the 2003 edition Orientalism (Penguin Books, 2003) barely does more than allude to the catastrophe of 9/11 but it’s the very minimalism of the author’s response/comment that strikes me as most significant –in dealing with an event that was, when he wrote, still recent in public imagination.

The preface on the whole is relatively light reading, written in a direct and accessible style as though Said wants to encourage new readers who have heard about the notorious difficulty of his writings and of Orientalism in particular. The author reiterates many of his by-now familiar positions and arguments in favor of “worldliness” as a critical point of view as opposed to other-worldliness (I suppose) and the inclusion of political & historical contexts in literary or cultural studies; he also restates his objections to purely formal studies that exclude these. In fact, Said hardly needs to remount this rampart since his assault on formalism – in subsequent works by Said and his epigones – pretty much permanently disabled almost all of the various schools of formalism (and structuralism & post structuralism) that flourished in American academies up until about the late 1970s or early 1980s. He also boasts about the huge success of his book in terms of its influence and number of translations. At one point he expresses regret for the prewar tranquility of the field of comparative literature, singling out the great Eric Auerbach whose seminal work Mimesis symbolizes the greatness of spirit and depth of mind of the grand old tradition of philology that had no ax to grind but only an admirable generosity of spirit for all great works regardless of provenance and nationality. What Said doesn’t mention is that he is one of the main scholars responsible for the present warlike state of literary and cultural studies.

Overall Said is on solid ground when he reiterates his chosen academic and theoretical positions and defends them with common sense and the idiosyncratic appeal of his powerfully recognizable voice. If the author had stuck to the academic side of his work, there would be little to object to in this preface. But as we know, Said likes to pontificate on a wide variety of subjects, especially political ones, and he does so again here. Those who agree with Said’s political opinions will be regaled of course: others may be less enchanted. Let’s get to the (as we used to say) nitty gritty.

If one wonders why literary scholars are entitled to pontificate on the political issues of the day, the answer might be that, for Said, the issues of Orientalism continue in any number of US-related disasters in the ME you might name.

One paragraph for example lists the major political events, wars, and other disasters since the publication of Orientalism that have provided context and atmosphere for his writing. There is unsurprisingly a harsh condemnation of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, which was just erupting as Said wrote this essay. For Said, it is the perfect example of an “orientalist” policy gone awry. The events however that precipitated that invasion–9/11–are alluded to but just barely as if Said realizes that a full discussion of these specifically Islamist atrocities may weaken his tactic of blaming the West and the USA in particular for everything that goes wrong in the Middle East. Said writes:

The suicide bombing phenomenon has appeared with all its hideous damage, none more lurid and apocalyptic of course than the events of September 11 and their aftermath in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. (xiii)

Is it just me who finds this sentence a bit strange? First, it’s amazing to hear 9/11 described as a “suicide bombing”; I was under the impression that the terrorists, having dispensed with mere bombs, were using large bodied passenger jets as explosive devices and the human passengers inside as kindling. By calling 9/11 a “suicide bombing” Said is showing how reluctant his mindset is to take in the simplest facts of the post- 9/11 world. And isn’t it a bit illogical as well? If I’m not mistaken, the sentence confuses cause & effect in implying the same agents for “suicide bomb phenomenon” and its “hideous damage” with the “aftermath” – that is the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Moreover, as a grammar teacher, I must point out that the sentence “suicide bombing phenomenon....with all its hideous damage” must be read as occurring again in the “aftermath” which is an absurdity.

For someone who lived in NYC at that time, as did Said, this is a remarkably thick skinned and perfunctory response to the unprecedented horror of those attacks.

One might also fault the phrase’s moral grammar as well. Said cannot finish even one sentence of condemnation of what is the single most stunning and (as he writes) ‘apocalyptic’ attack ever perpetrated by terrorists – many Americans are still trying to digest the implications of the incredible human & physical destruction perpetrated that day (incubated in a brilliant but evil mind whose possessor is fortunately dead) by the violent means we know by Saudi terrorists (and one Emirati) subscribing to Islamist ideology. The ultra violence that resulted in the deaths of nearly five thousand people was not a “suicide bombing” but the most destructive act of war ever carried out on US soil.

In any case, even before he has given a full mention of the destruction and horrors of 9/11 or named its perpetrators, or the number of American casualties, he rushes on to the next topic, which of course is a condemnation of US foreign policy. Later Said names his favorite enemies in the US foreign policy establishment (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle etc) but on the other side not a word about Mohammed Atta or Al Qaeda. Bin Laden is condemned in the rogue’s gallery of the final sentence of the preface, but Americans George Bush and Rumsfeld outnumber him in that gallery.

If Said had examined this event more carefully and honestly, he might have tried to place it in a meaningful historical and moral context, maybe even revised his anti-orientalist critique, and granted the validity of some Western fears and suspicion of Islam but he does not. The actuality of the horror of these attacks on four different sites in one day should have forced him to move beyond the old "blame America" paradigm & admit the autonomy of motivation of these “Oriental” subjects – as the expression of an equivalent misguided “Occidentalism” on the part of Arab Muslims. (Said reveals a moral and intellectual obtuseness in these statements that could well alienate potential readers before they even get to his book.)

The other mention of 9/11 comes in a paragraph devoted to the evil influence of mass media on education in the way these institutions portray the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Said claims that the media have created “… the demonization of an unknown enemy, for whom the label ‘terrorist’ serves the general purpose of keeping people stirred up and angry…” He goes on: “… media images command too much attention and can be exploited at times of crisis and insecurity of the kind that the post-9/11 has produced.” (xx)

This is a reasonable fear on the part of Said, and many other liberal commentators have deplored the degradation of public discourse caused by these events. It’s curious to note nevertheless that this is one of the only two mentions of terror or terrorism in the piece – and in both cases quotes indicate Said’s rejection of these terms.

As far as I’m concerned, however, a statement later in the essay is so questionable as to cast doubt on the basic premises of the book itself. It comes in the midst of a discussion of East West misunderstandings caused by the Iraq War in which Said first deplores the abandonment of “rational argument” and “moral principles” by US ideologues and officials in favor of jingoism and contempt for other cultures and then examines the obstacles to rationality by Mid Eastern governments and societies.

Admitting that the mindset isn’t much better in “Arab and Muslim countries,” he writes,
citing another source:

The region has slipped into an easy anti-Americanism that shows little understanding of what the US is really like as a society. Because the governments are relatively powerless to affect US policy toward them, they turned their energies to repressing and keeping down their own populations, which results in resentment, anger and helpless imprecations that do nothing to open up societies where secular ideas about human history and development have been overtaken by failure and frustration, as well as by any Islamism built out of rote learning, the obliteration of what are perceived to be other, competitive forms of secular knowledge, and an inability to analyze and exchange ideas within the generally discordant world of modern discourse.(xxi)

Said also notes significantly the disappearance of “critical thinking” in favor of “orthodoxy and dogma” in public discussions in these countries. I can agree and sympathize with his concern.

But what strikes me as less reasonable is sentence two (“Because the governments are relatively powerless to affect US policy toward them, they turned their energies to repressing and keeping down their own populations, which results in resentment, anger and helpless imprecations that do nothing to open up societies...”). This idea is, recycled, one of the oldest excuses for inaction heard in the Middle East since time immemorial. It is nothing more than the expression of the perennial blame game, in which the US is to blame for everything that goes wrong in the Middle East because middle Easterners are “powerless and helpless.” Said here is guilty of stereotyping the people he’s trying to defend. So instead of looking lucidly at the political situations in these countries, Said provides one more excuse for middle Easterners to duck responsibility, and entirely misses the the self-directed political movement that came out of the Arab Spring.

[This kind of reasoning plays very well in the ME of course because official censorship makes all criticism of heads of state off-limits, so discontent is always channeled to the USA, the safe target; hence the liberal dose of hypocrisy in the stream of anti-Americanism in this region.)

Poor powerless dictators and a helpless populace--in short the usual suspects.

Even more important is the recent fact that the Egyptian people, inspired by the example of the Tunisians, lost the fear that previously had made them helpless against the big strong man with all his thugs. And triumphantly showed they were not helpless or powerless. They revolted against a blight that at thirty years and counting seemed permanent, fighting for their rights in the streets using their own ideas, impulses and tactics until they toppled the stone face.

So the revolutions of the “Arab Spring” significantly challenge the old blame America game—and, better, impress us with Arabs’ self-directed talents & abilities to act independently and for their own purposes.

If Said were alive, I wonder what he’s say about all this? He might genuinely celebrate the powerful movement toward democracy and freedom or he might regret the loss of one of the biggest propaganda weapons in his arsenal.

Said ends by a grand and noble statement- to the effect that “the human ... desire for enlightenment and emancipation is not easily deferred, despite the incredible strength of the opposition to it that comes from the Rumsfelds, bin Ladens, Sharons and Bushes of this world. I would like to believe that Orientalism has had a place in the long and often interrupted road to human freedom.” (xxiii)

This statement might have seemed more plausible six months ago, but now we can clearly see who Said left out of his list of oppressors: Pres. Ben Ali, Pres. Mubarak, Pres. Saleh of Yemen, Basher Al Assad and many more tyrants who for decades have been ruling Arab countries in the Middle East or North Africa.

As for Said’s views on 9/11 expressed in this preface, as already noted, they are shockingly minimal and schematic. He does not complete one sentence about the event. His real vitriol in the piece, sadly enough, is reserved for two fellow scholars, Bernard Lewis and Fouad Adjami. And although he places Bin Laden in the rogues’ gallery at the end, the al Qaeda mastermind is outnumbered by two Americans.

In deflecting attention from who was really ruling, oppressing, imprisoning, torturing and assassinating his fellow Arabs, Said may not have been leading his fellow Arabs toward freedom at all but toward one more form of political futility, which when you look at it closely, resembles the kind of victimology Said is supposedly against.

"Your Silence is Killing Us"

How can one be silent about Syria with all the mayhem going on in that country? Yet what can one say? I’m sitting here in Turkey with a wrecked back and can’t do much about world problems, but what I can do is send a few messages to a few friends in the hope that they may spread the word. The following are observations of someone who has observed the “Arab Spring” while living in the region since the beginning mainly via television and Internet.

As for the back problem, I’m now lying on a comfortable bed in a decent Istanbul hotel, getting as much bed rest as I can and speaking into the dictation program!

First I have to say that I admire the courage, stamina and craftiness of the Syrian people–qualities that we have seen in other national uprisings—in standing up to one of the most brutal son-of-a-bitches on record–Basher al-Assad. I should also admit my status as an amateur commentator on Middle eastern affairs; I speak no Arabic and get all of my news from the media. I know a few Syrians in Al Ain & at my university in the UAE, but I’ve never had a chance to plumb their feelings or minds in any depth. As for the Syrian people in general, they do get good word of mouth from both professional and casual travelers who go there and report back. I have never been to Syria but would like very much to visit in the near future.

Secondly, it seems to me that the qualities shown by the Syrian people are those we have seen other Arab nationalities exercise effectively. I’ve been extremely impressed by how these popular rebellions have exploited basic Arab & Islamic religious patterns (and social street behavior) to instigate and strengthen their political protest movements; Most amazing to my mind is the way the protesters have used the weekly Friday prayers meeting to launch and relaunch their protests so that their religious day is integrated into (and partly legitimates, one would think) the political movement. Early in the “spring,” the joke went around that one of the dictators would do well to abolish the day Friday altogether. With Ramadan now upon us (Ramazan in Turkey) it will be extremely interesting to see if the Syrian protesters can make good their threat to up the pressure on Basher during this time. The other religious event is the spectacle of street funerals for victims of the repression – a sad but vigorous Arab tradition – that seems to serve both to mourn the dead and rally the living. The other basic cultural trait, I see, that supports the political movement is the willingness of the Arabs to go into the street and coalesce as a crowd – often with tragic results as we’ve seen continually—but overall showing a kind of courage week after week that commands respect (& must dismay the tiny brain behind the closely-set eyes of Basher the Basher).

What can one do? Very little of course but one issue to my mind especially with Americans is the fact that the US government excludes Al Jazeera television; without the direct and indirect input of a major news outlet foreign issues remain vague and cloudy, mere hearsay. So my first suggestion to all those who care about the bloody situation of the Syrians is to request the FTA or the State Department to immediately cease its ban of Al Jazeera TV and let that important conduit of communications into the country. Al Jazeera is covering the Syrian situation better than any other channel, probably because they are one of the few news outlets allowed into that country. Americans are already endangered by their provincialism and remoteness from world events; we need more foreign news in more foreign news channels, not less.

The other point concerns petitioning our representatives and informing them of our views on Syria. I believe we can’t turn our backs on what appears to be a huge pro- democracy movement against a brutal dictatorship that responds to legitimate demands of its population by regular massacres of peaceful civilians. If we were willing to sacrifice American blood to bring democracy to Iraq, we ought to support a movement in favor of the same ideals that is self-generated in a country next door. According to Al Jazeera, the Syrian demonstrators' signs recently read “your silence is killing us”.

[note added later: this was apparently directed to other Syrians in cities such a Damascus -- and other Arab countries, whh recently did respond finally]

Our government has taken some steps in the right direction such as ambassador Ford’s recent visit to the demonstrations in Hama, and Hillary Clinton has made some good statements but our government needs to do much more than this in my opinion. With their great experience and connections in world affairs, they ought to be able to think of something that makes it clear to Basher Al Assad that he’s going to pay a price for his criminal repression of peaceful civilians. Perhaps Basher’s actions should be the basis for the definition of a new kind of crime against humanity—populace repression?–and be classified among those punishable by the Hague War Crimes tribunal. A few years ago an international arrest warrant was issued for the president of Sudan for his ethnic cleansing of the Christian south. In what way are Basher al-Assad’s crimes against his own people any less than those of the Sudanese president?

Blood was. The Hawk was. Pain was.

Yalo. By Elias Khoury
Translated by Humphrey Davies
Maclehose Press/Quercus UK (paperback)
7.99 344 pp.

Reviewed by James Dalglish

A brief summary of Yalo could make it sound like the latest Robert Ludlum thriller. In a war-torn country, a man accused of conspiracy and rape is subjected to shocking tortures in an atmosphere of paranoid politics and international intrigue. The tale is riddled with sex and violence plus a good deal of grotesque, sometimes obscene imagery. But the fact is that Yalo is not a thriller at all despite its lurid contents.

The story goes like this: In post-civil war Lebanon, a young ex-militiaman Yalo (nickname for Daniel) is not readjusting well to peacetime. Working as an armed guard of a rich man's villa, he begins raping and robbing couples who come for surreptitious sex to a nearby lovers Lane. The uneducated thug falls in love with one of the women he rapes, pursues her, trying futilely to win her heart, and though he is rejected in the end by the upper-class woman, he becomes less brutal and a potentially decent human being through his love for her, or so the author implies. In the end, Yalo is absolved of the more sinister conspiracies but sentenced for his common crimes.

These bare bones of the story however don’t convey its disorienting experimental texture. Indeed, one of the most striking qualities about this novel is the way the author subverts the linear nature of narration and turns it into something closer to random access. If you’re looking for one coherent continuous story, you won’t find it here. Rather you will find multiple versions of Yalo’s life and crimes told and retold as he undergoes a set of gruesome tortures that not only damage his body but also fragment his mind. And since the novel is told from Yalo’s point of view, the impressionistic vortex of his mind is our only source of information. The challenge is, this information is often expressed in non literal language, so we have to wade at time through prose saturated with Yalo’s personal myths, images and symbols.

The torture that Yalo undergoes, for example, is brutal but never literal, fleshly but not pornographic. Here he is on “the throne”: “Blood was. The hawk was. Pain was. Then suddenly the body left its owner and went to a place of pains too many to number. He saw it moving away and plunging into a pool of pain.”

The torture imagery turns into a bizarre sexual fantasy in which he becomes a squid making love to Shireen, another squid. The squid imagery naturally leads to ink: “He dove into the depths, stretched out his eight hands and flew through the water... he squirted his ink to mislead them, and the ink came out the colour of blood.”

And of course, ink links to Khoury’s ultimate topic--writing itself. Yalo, you see has been assigned the task of writing his confessions; though these are as confused as his thoughts, the process of self-creation by means of that mystical substance ink helps Yalo reach truths about his life that though irrelevant to the police show the reader Yalo has understood his crimes and matured.

Khoury’s theme is the effect on the human mind of torture, shown through many vivid and excruciating scenes but in which the language illuminates rather than deliver the Ludlum like thrill: here Yalo ironically congratulates his tormentors for the “inventiveness of the forms of torture you employ and on your capacity to extract confessions from the accused as easily as extracting his soul... However violent torture may be, its physical effects wear off quickly and all that remains is the spiritual effect, which makes you feel the soul is about to depart.”

[If Yalo is an allegory of writing, I wondered mischievously at times, what role would the torturers play? Could we identify them with syntax? Spelling? Style?]

Despite the tight focus on Yalo’s torment, the exterior settings and culture of Lebanon and Beirut still come through – especially in Yalo’s reveries of his Assyrian family, dominated by his grandfather, a priest of the sect, who still remembers the ancestral massacre of Ward Ein in Kurdish Turkey and tries to keep the quaint old (Eastern Christian Orthodox) practices going. Khoury’s highly concrete and sensual style not only reflects Yalo’s basic Arab macho personality but also the hedonistic culture of Lebanon that contrasts strikingly with the Puritanism of the Arab Gulf.

Though linguistically I can’t judge the faithfulness of Humphrey Davies’ translation to the original text in Arabic, I can say that what I hear in it is the coherent voice of a clearly defined character – Yalo’s diction can’t be overly ornate or learned yet must be subtle enough to carry a whole novel. It could be no easy task to fashion such a voice but Davies has done so very skillfully. He’s no traditore.

Originally published in Banipal 40 (mag of Modern Arab Lit published in London UK), spring 2011.

My course raised questions about authoritarian gov't

Friends of Harry James: No, I’m not claiming I started the pro-democracy movement in the Middle-East! Only this: that I emphasized -- in a course dedicated to “World Ideas” – those concepts that most strongly supported personal freedom, human rights and rebellion against illegitimate government. In short, I am proud of the fact that before anything was heard publicly about a fall of a tyrant in Tunisia, I was quizzing my students here in the principality on (among other things) Rousseau's famous treatise concerning the basis of legitimate government. This is an excerpt from a final exam I gave January 17 at UAEU in Al Ain, UAE. The students’ interesting answers I reserve for another time.

Part IV. JJ Rousseau & the Enlightenment Period
A. Reading #1 (5)
"It is my wish to inquire whether it be possible, within the civil order, to discover a legitimate and stable basis of government. This I shall do by considering human beings as they are and laws as they might be." –From The Social Contract
Comment & interpretation (5) More of realism or idealism? Why is the word legitimate important?

(space in which to write)

B Reading #2
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Many a man believes himself to be the master of others who is, no less than they, a slave. How did this change take place? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? To this question I hope to be able to furnish an answer." –From The Social Contract

Vocab/key terms. Give the definition in the context of the passage (2 pts each)
a free__________________________________________ (2)
b slave_________________________________________ (2)
c legitimate (edited) __________________________ (2)
C. Comment & interpretation: (10) What typical ideas or ideals do we find from Enlightenment period in this passage? Find at least two ideas/ideals.


(space in whh to write)


D. In what way does JJR’s style compliment his ideas? (2)
_________________________________________________________________________